Frederic Lardinois fries up the tasty bites of news for our breakfast:

Google’s Container Engine, its service for running and managing Docker containers on its cloud platform...is now out of beta. ... Google now considers it ready for production use and backs it with a 99.5 percent uptime SLA. … [It] allows developers to set up a managed cluster for their container deployments with just a few clicks. ... Developers who want to use the service need to set up their clusters and declare their container’s requirements. ... Google’s service will [then] monitor the cluster. … Developers can scale their cluster as needed. The system also allows for hybrid deployments using the Google Cloud VPN. MORE

And Jaikumar Vijayan explains more further, also:

Google announced Container Engine last year as a cluster management and orchestration tool for Docker containers. It's been available on a beta basis...for the past several months. …One of the most touted benefits of container technology is that it boosts application portability and delivery. Containers developed in one environment can run equally well in another [so] developers do not have to worry about the underlying infrastructure when developing. … Google's Container Engine...is based on [its] open-source Kubernetes orchestration technology. [It] supports what Google describes as a declarative management feature. ... Using a simple JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) configuration file, developers can declare their container requirements, such as the amount of CPU or memory. MORE

From the horse's mouth, it's Google's Craig Mcluckie:

While containers make packaging apps easier, a powerful cluster manager and orchestration system is necessary to bring your workloads to production. [It] also makes application management easier. … Many applications take advantage of multiple containers; for example, a web application might have separate containers for the webserver, cache, and database. ... Most customers live in a multi-cloud world, using both on-premises and public cloud infrastructures to host their applications...you’ll be able to move workloads, or take advantage of multiple cloud providers...whether you use on-premises, hybrid, or public cloud infrastructure. … Everything at Google, from Search to Gmail, is packaged and run in a Linux container. Each week we launch more than 2 billion container instances. MORE

There are two open-source technologies underlying Container Engine:..Docker for automating the deployment of applications inside software containers, and the Google-built Kubernetes for making these siloed applications work together in unison even when hosted across multiple cloud hosts. … Beyond management of clusters, Container Engine also equips [you] with logging and container health checking tools, and makes it incredibly easy to scale CPU and memory up or down as an applications’ needs change. …Siloing applications with Kubernetes into separate, virtual environments allows one to easily limit the resources any one environment gets access to, preventing an app gone haywire from hogging too much of the total available memory, for example. MORE

Still up in the air...is the matter of whether a preferred public platform for container deployment will emerge out of the melee that is today’s market. … Container Engine is effectively Google’s public product-ization of Kubernetes as a service. ... It builds a business model not so much around containers as around orchestration. … Cloud infrastructure platforms are, at their core, mainly a pool of virtual machines. But [Google's] ultimate goal [is] a world where...conventional VMs had ceased to exist. MORE

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